a thread for mundane ironists

[b]Existential Comics

The bizarre reality of the human condition is that almost everyone is more bothered by being turned down for a date than the realization that life is meaningless.[/b]

Anyone here realize that life is meaningless? Or am I still the only one?

We need to do something about postmodernism being taught in our schools, corrupting our young people! Did your know that 1 in 3 students who encounter postmodern philosophy go on to write a terrible 600 page avant-garde novel with interweaving narratives and no real plot?

Well, it’s not like anyone can force you to read them.
Yet.

It’s important to learn your logical fallacies so you can give the same shallow argument in a more annoying fashion.

Of course that’s just another one.

Liberals think Russia flipped the election by buying $100k in Facebook ads, but the fact that Wall Street gives millions to their favorite candidate is just a normal functioning democracy.

Either that or [still] the best of all possible worlds.

Existentialism: life is despair.
Absurdism: despair is meaningless.
Pessimism: they’re is no way out of despair.
Nihilism: it doesn’t even matter that we despair.
Capitalism: can u sell despair? asking for a friend.

No wonder the capitalists won.

Ayn Rand read Nietzsche and thought to herself, “by Übermensch he must mean someone who owns property and becomes fantastically rich off the labor of their workers”.

Let’s try to imagine Nietzsche reading Ayn Rand.

[b]Timothy Snyder

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.[/b]

Let’s file this one under, “somewhere between ‘well said’ and ‘blah, blah, blah’”

When meaning is drawn from killing, the risk is that more killing would bring more meaning.

After you’re chosen sides of course.

Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.

In other words, not counting conflicting goods. Where both sides have access to facts.

If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent, if businessmen had endorsed the prohibition of slavery, if bureaucrats had refused to handle paperwork involving murder, then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities by which we remember it.

If only this were actually relevant to what did in fact happen.

The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.

Anyone care to bring this down to earth?

Like Hitler, the president used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking, and presented journalism as a campaign against himself. The president was on friendlier terms with the internet, his source for erroneous information that he passed on to millions of people.

What president might that be?

[b]Yuval Noah Harari

We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine.[/b]

On the other hand, there’s how the objectivists study history. If you know what I mean.

…in order to change an existing imagined order, we must first believe in an alternative imagined order.

I know: It better be yours.

Each and every one of us has been born into a given historical reality, ruled by particular norms and values, and managed by a unique economic and political system. We take this reality for granted, thinking it is natural, inevitable and immutable.

At least try to grasp the implications of this.

History isn’t a single narrative, but thousands of alternative narratives. Whenever we choose to tell one, we are also choosing to silence others.

At least try to grasp the implications of this.

Domesticated chickens and cattle may well be an evolutionary success story, but they are also among the most miserable creatures that ever lived. The domestication of animals was founded on a series of brutal practices that only became crueller with the passing of the centuries.

On the other hand, he figured, if we didn’t eat them there’d be a hell of a lot less of them around.

People are usually afraid of change because they fear the unknown. But the single greatest constant of history is that everything changes.

And then the part where it changes for all of eternity.

[b]tiny nietzsche

sometimes I can’t tell if I’ve done enough things or I should be doing more things[/b]

Time to flip the coin.

I’m here for nothing

Unless of course that’s something.

wicked beasts:
goats
crocodile
nic cage

And not just Ben Sanderson.

high on postmodernism

In other words not high at all.

tomorrow is take your sword to work day

Remember when that was actually true?

millennials are okay, i guess. I mean besides being hopelessly fucked

Let’s explain this.

[b]Russell Banks

Biology doesn’t matter, the Christians argued, because this body we live in is not ultimately real; history doesn’t matter, they said, because God’s time is different and superior to man’s anyhow; and forget cause and effect, forget what you’ve been told about the physical world, because there is heaven and there is hell and there is this green earth in between, and you are always alive in one of the three places.[/b]

Believe it!!

From then on, we were simply different people. Not new people; different.

Though sometimes it’s a distinction without a whole lot of difference.

John had once said to me, in a complaining tone, that Father had taught us to be afraid of no man except him. And it was true. Father always insisted that we think for ourselves in every way, except when we disagreed with him, and that we hold ourselves independent of every man’s will, except his. He wanted us simultaneously to be independent and yet to serve him.

One more rendition of half a loaf?

Other people were in one world; he was in a second. And the distance between their worlds caused other concern and perplexity made them curious about him – for here he was alone in his world; and there they were gathered together in theirs.

It’s just more extreme around me.

One minute he was moving securely through time and space, in perfect coordination with other people; then, with no warning, he was out of step, was somehow removed from everyone else’s sense of time and place, so that the slightest movement, word, facial expression or gesture contained enormous significance. The room filled with coded messages that he could not decode, and he slipped quickly into barely controlled hysteria.

Been there, done that. Twice so far.

Because it’s anger that drives us and delivers us. It’s not any kind of love either-love for the underdog or the victim, or whatever you want to call them. Some litigators like to claim that. The losers.

Anger bgeing right around the corner from vengeance.

[b]David Sedaris

They’re hungry for something they know nothing about, but we, we know all too well that the price of fame is the loss of privacy.[/b]

Well, like you, I wouldn’t know about that.

I had no job at the time and was living off the cruel joke I referred to as my savings.

At least until Trump drains the swamp.

Three days after that, the funeral was held, and while riding from the church to the cemetery Ava looked out the widow and noticed that everyone she passed was crying.
Old people, college students, even the colored men at the gas station-- the soul brothers, or whatever we’re supposed to call them now.
It was such an outdated term, I just had to use it myself.
How did the soul brothers know your father?
That’s just it, she said. No one told us until after the burial that Kennedy had been shot. It happened when we were in the church, so that’s what everyone was so upset about. The president, not my father.

That could actually be a true story.

I like the trail that the Internet created. For example, I was watching one of those Douglas Sirk movies, and I noticed that Rock Hudson towered over everyone, and I typed in “How tall was” and I saw “How tall was Jesus,” and I’m like, “Sure,” and half an hour later you’re somewhere you didn’t expect to be. It doesn’t work that same way in books, does it? Even if you have an encyclopedia, the trail isn’t that crazy. I like that aspect of it.

Okay, but how tall was Jesus?

Use the word ‘ya’ll’ and before you knew it, you’d find yourself in a haystack french-kissing an underage goat.

And we know where they use that, don’t we?

It means ‘female dog,’ I’d explained to my sisters, but it also means ‘a woman who’s crabby and won’t let you be yourself’.

Did the bitches buy it?

[b]so sad today

she died as she lived: feeling like she was about to die[/b]

I’m right behind her.

find what you love and let it ignore you

This is either not as easy or as hard as it sounds.

it’s not my fault i was born: the musical

Or, for others, the situation comedy.

just checking to see if everything is still fucking stupid and it is

She should just put that on automatic pilot.

search history:
how to love yourself
how to kinda like yourself
how to not totally hate yourself
how to begrudgingly keep existing

Or you can keep searching.

why does anyone do anything

More astonishing still: over and over and over again.

[b]Elena Ferrante

I said to myself that maturity consisted in accepting the turn that existence had taken without getting too upset, following a path between daily practices and theoretical achievements, learning to see oneself, know oneself, in expectation of great changes.[/b]

Given that, any mature folks here?

Men, dazed by pleasure, absent-mindedly sow their seed. Overcome by their orgasm, they fertilize us. They show up inside us and withdraw, leaving, concealed in our flesh, their ghost, like a lost object.

Or close enough?

People died of carelessness, of corruption, of abuse, and yet, in every round of voting, gave their enthusiastic approval to the politicians who made their life unbearable.

Of course with the next election that will all change.

Reading and writing are closed-room activities, which literally take you away from the gaze of others. The greater risk is that they also remove others from your gaze.

I’ll take my chances, he thought.

If you don’t try, nothing ever changes.

Which for some is ever as it should be.

…starting at a certain point, the future is only a need to live in the past. To immediately redo the grammatical tenses.

Let’s exchange points.

[b]Garry Kasparov

I have written about what I call “the gravity of past success” in chess. Each victory pulls the victor down slightly and makes it harder to put in maximum effort to improve further. Meanwhile, the loser knows that he made a mistake, that something went wrong, and he will work hard to improve for next time. The happy winner often assumes he won simply because he is great. Typically, however, the winner is just the player who made the next-to-last mistake. It takes tremendous discipline to overcome this tendency and to learn lessons from a victory.[/b]

Or, if you’re lucky, the victories are few and far between.

Big branches in the decision tree require extra caution. These are the forks in the road that leave us with no way back.

My guess: the chessboard being the least of it.

Sometimes the best defence is the best defence.

My guess: the chessboard being the least of it.

I used to attack because it was the only thing I knew. Now I attack because I know it works.

My guess: the chessboard being the least of it.

One comforting thing about the Trump White House is that you aren’t forced to choose between malice and incompetence.

The perfect observation!

The Putin regime is and always has been about one thing: money. Specifically, about how to move it into the bank accounts of Putin’s.

Can Don trump him?

[b]Philosophy Tweets

“Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.” Friedrich Nietzsche[/b]

Next up: Eternal recurrence.

“The chief cause of human errors is to be found in the prejudices picked up in childhood.” Rene Descartes

Especially their prejudices.

“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” Albert Camus

Or: “In the depths of summer, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible winter.”

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.” Albert Camus

Or: “Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be authentic.”

“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” Henry David Thoreau

No, sometimes it really is what you look at.

“Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.” Euripides

And, here, not just the Kids.

[b]José Saramago

It is well known that the human mind very often makes decisions for reasons it clearly does not know, presumably because it does so after having travelled the paths of the mind at such speed that, afterwards, it cannot recognise those paths, let alone find them again.[/b]

Actually, it is not well known enough.

There is nothing as sad, nothing as unutterably sad, as an old man crying.

And not a soul around who is bothered.

In the various arts, and above all in that of writing, the shortest distance between two points, even if close to each other, has never been and never will be, nor is it now, what is known as a straight line, never, never, to put it strongly and emphatically in response to any doubts, to silence them once and for all.

Let’s make it one anyway, they said.

The good and the evil resulting from our words and deeds go on apportioning themselves, one assumes in a reasonably uniform and balanced way, throughout all the days to follow, including those endless days, when we shall not be here to find out, to congratulate ourselves or ask for pardon, indeed there are those who claim that this is the much-talked-of immortality. Possibly, but this man is dead and must be buried.

More of one then of the other. Then more of the other than of the one.

… time is a master of ceremonies who always ends up putting us in our rightful place, we advance, stop, and retreat according to his orders, our mistake lies in imagining that we can catch him out.

Not a mistake so much as a delusion.

Perfect moments, especially when they verge on the sublime have the grave disadvantage of being very short lived, which in fact, being obvious, we would not need to mention were it not that they have a still greater disadvantage, which is that we do not know what to do once they are over.

Anyone here ever had one?

[b]Valeria Luiselli

Real writers never show their teeth. Charlatans, in contrast, flash that sinister crescent when they smile. Check it out. Find photos of all the writers you respect, and you’ll see that their teeth remain a permanently occult mystery.[/b]

This can’t possibly be true of course. But point taken.

The most important thing in this life, Master Oklahoma used to say at the end of each session, is to have a destiny.

Either that or the least important.

However differently we spoke the language, as Spanish speakers, our close ties with Latin and Greek gave us a sense of superiority: we were the heirs to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its discoveries: the demiurgic function of articles, inventing the world by enunciating it.

We’re not going to take that, right?

He fell into a solemn silence, which he only eventually broke to say, “I think I’ve become a terrible person. In fact, I’ve become a reptile. Do you know that reptiles are stupid because almost their entire brain capacity is used to feel fear?"

Of course that’s probably all genetic.

In the small glass box the auctioneer held high lay waiting for me the sacred teeth of none other than Marilyn Monroe.

What would you pay for it? Or: What would you pay for her sacred pubic hair?

I harbored the secret hope, or rather, the secret certainty, that one day I would finally turn into myself.

And how idiotic is that!

[b]Masha Gessen

It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.[/b]

Of course it’s always their own damn fault.

The people who came were not always the ones who most needed to escape: they were the ones most capable of escaping.

And not just from Dannemora.

In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history – political history and art history – is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites – in describing the brave as traitorous, the weak as frightening, and the good as bad – and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do.

Think Stalin and Hitler and [now] Putin.
And, sure, someday, maybe Trump.

Here is what I was trying to figure out: how a miracle happens. A great work of art – something that makes people pay attention, return to the work again and again, and reexamine their assumptions, something that infuriates, hurts, and confronts – a great work of art is always a miracle.

No miracles here, are there?

The Soviet regime robbed people not only of their ability to live freely but also of the ability to understand fully what had been taken from them, and how.

Of course that can never happen here.
You know, if it hasn’t already started.

At the time of the October Revolution, the Russian intellectual elite had been both a part and a partner to the European conversation about God, power, and human life. After fifty years of purges, arrests, and, most damaging, unrelenting pressure on what had become an isolated thought universe, the Russian intellectual landscape was populated by barely articulated ghosts of once vibrant ideas. Even Communist ideology was a shadow of its former self, a set of ritually repeated words that had lost all meaning.

One possible explanation: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=185296

[b]God

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing with your life.[/b]

Really? I hadn’t noticed.

Don’t say “2019 can’t come fast enough”. I know what’s coming in 2019 and believe Me, 2018 can’t leave slow enough.

Either the Second Coming or the Fourth Reich.

My deepest hope is that one day there will be a world without war or hunger or injustice or human beings.

Doesn’t He call the shots here?

Sometimes I watch you in the shower.

God the pervert.

I admire the state of Alabama’s single-minded determination to be great at college football and bad at everything else in the world.

Make sure Mr. Reasonable sees this one. :laughing:

I make this resolution every new year and then don’t follow through but I SWEAR 2019 will be the year I kill you all.

Let’s come back to this a year from now.

:laughing:

[b]Barbara Kingsolver

So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they’ll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right. Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.
I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, No, it’s not like that. It’s not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.
In balance.
Really, it’s like the spirits have made a deal with us.
And what is the deal? I asked.
We’re on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we’re saying: We know how nice you’re being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, and we’ll try to be good guests.
Like a note you’d send somebody after you stayed in their house?
Exactly like that. Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn’t your favorite one.[/b]

Religion and the pragmatist? Or does it actually go deeper than that?

For if there is any single thing that everyone hopes for most dearly, it must be this: that the youngest outlive the oldest.

We’ll need a context of course.

This is how moths speak to each other. They tell their love across the fields by scent. There is no mouth, the wrong words are impossible, either a mate is there or he is not, and if so the pair will find each other in the dark.

And autonomy enters into it not at all.

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history.

Depending of course on where [and when] history touches you.

Hunger of the body is altogether different from the shallow, daily hunger of the belly. Those who have known this kind of hunger cannot entirely love, ever again, those who have not.

People think shit like this all the time. So there might actually be something to it.

He was getting that look he gets, oh boy, like Here comes Moses tromping down off of Mount Syanide with ten fresh ways to wreck your life.

And then on top of that to judge you.

[b]Pat Conroy

There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.[/b]

Let’s pin down the equivalent in the North.

Her library would have been valuable to a bibliophile except she treated her books execrably. I would rarely open a volume that she had not desecrated by underlining her favorite sections with a ball-point pen. Once I had told her that I would rather see a museum bombed than a book underlined, but she dismissed my argument as mere sentimentality. She marked her books so that stunning images and ideas would not be lost to her.

I’m with her actually.

He was one of those rare men who are capable of being fully in love only once in their lives.

That’s once more than men like me.

Why do they not teach you that time is a finger snap and an eye blink, and that you should not allow a moment to pass you by without taking joyous, ecstatic note of it, not wasting a single moment of its swift, breakneck circuit?

How absurd is this?

When men talk about the agony of being men, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of self-pity. And when women talk about being women, they can never quite get away from the recurrent theme of blaming men.

Unless of course it’s the other way around. However entirely unlikely.

I’d be a conservative if I’d never met any. They’re selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.

We know that all the ones here are.

[b]Jan Mieszkowski

Time is
Philosophy: an ideal construct
Economics: a real construct
Psychology: a material construct
Existentialism: a drag[/b]

Obviously: None of the above.

On Christmas we remember that
Marx: capitalism is a religion
Schopenhauer: God is gift wrapping
Nietzsche: gift wrapping is dead

Well, maybe next Christmas.

All I want for Christmas is
Leibniz: a perfectly rational language
Hegel: a perfectly determinate negation
Marx: a perfectly dynamic model of labor
Nietzsche: a perfectly good excuse to ignore all you clowns

Well, maybe next Christmas.

Idealism: I’ve understood your arguments and refuted them
Empiricism: I’ve understood your arguments and ignored them
Existentialism: I’ve completely misunderstood your arguments but have decided to steal them anyway

Which one is most likely to be the least misunderstood?

Email from a student who failed to turn in the final paper: “I got embroiled in a two-day debate on Reddit and had nothing left to give.”

So, is this even possible?

Psychology: Blame your parents
Political Economy: Blame your boss
Sociology: Blame your community
Philosophy: I’m logically, ontologically, epistemologically, ethically, and aesthetically innocent!

Clearly: We’ll need a fucking context!

[b]John Fowles from The French Lieutenant’s Woman

They looked down on her; and she looked up through them.[/b]

And that makes all the difference in the world sometimes.

His statement to himself should have been ‘I possess this now,therefore I am happy’ , instead of what it so Victorianly was: 'I cannot possess this forever, therefore I am sad.

And that makes all the difference in the world sometimes.

Yet this distance, all those abysses unbridged and then unbridgeable by radio, television, cheap travel and the rest, was not wholly bad. People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more. But I am a heretic, I think our ancestors’ isolation was like the greater space they enjoyed: it can only be envied. The world is only too literally too much with us now.

Maybe. Though just as readily maybe not.

Duty is but a pot. It holds whatever is put in it, from the greatest evil to the greatest good.

Lots and lots of pots like that for lots and lots of other things.

Sometimes I almost pity them. I think I have a freedom they cannot understand. No insult, no blame can touch me. Because I have set myself beyond the pale. I am nothing, I am hardly human any more. I am the French Lieutenant’s Whore.

On the other hand, what does that explain?

That’s the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery.

Is that really worse than the opposite?

[b]Existential Comics

The worst crime for:
Utilitarianism: causing suffering.
Existentialism: going along with the herd.
Stoicism: being affected by what you can’t control.
Capitalism: trying to do things that benefit society instead of maximizing shareholder profit.[/b]

Let’s decide: Which is the best of all possible worlds?

Epictetus: “Do not explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
Carnap: “Yeah but how do I verify that empirically?”
Epictetus: “God damn it, shut up, nerd.”

You know, hypothetically.

My New Year’s resolution is to not start a podcast. Wish me luck.

No, seriously, what on earth does this mean?

Okay, but have we completely ruled out the idea that postmodernism was created by Russian bots in order to undermine Western values??

Of course nothing really can be ruled out.

…we’ve been doing philosophy for like three thousand years, and not only have we not discovered the truth, but we still can’t even agree on what “truth” means.

No, but I’ll bet many here can define it.

Philosophically speaking, everyone’s tweets are bad. The only ethical thing to do is for us all to delete our accounts and never speak of this again.

Let’s apply that to here. You first.